Nudging in The Digital Big Data Era
Nudging in The Digital Big Data Era

Summary/Abstract: In the current Behavioral Economics entrance into public policy science, completely undescribed remains that the implicit hidden persuasion opens a gate to deception and is an unprecedented social class division means. Today's social media revolution opens gates to a class dividing nudgital society, in which the provider of social communication tools can reap surplus value from the information shared of social media users. The social media provider thereby becomes a capitalist-industrialist, who benefits from the information shared by social media users as the consumer-worker share private information in their wish to interact with friends and communicate to public. The social media capitalist-industrialist reaps surplus value from the social media consumer-workers’ information sharing, which stems from nudging social media users. For one, social media space can be sold to marketers who can constantly penetrate the consumer-worker in a subliminal way with advertisements. But also nudging occurs as the big data compiled about the social media consumer-worker can be resold to marketers and technocrats to draw inferences about consumer choices, contemporary market trends or individual personality cues used for governance control, such as, for instance, border protection and tax compliance purposes. Addressing the nudgital society allows to better understand the laws of motion of governance in the digital age, leading to the potentially unequal accumulation and concentration of power. Technological improvement in the age of information has increased the possibilities to control the innocent social media users and reap the benefits of their existence in hidden persuasion. Nudging can be criticized to be used by the ruling class to exploit the governed populace. In modern democracies, the right to rule was recently proven to be plundered in democratic votes through misguiding information of alternative facts and fake news circulated on social media. The socio-ethical crises that are rooted in the contradictory class division of the nudgital society are presented in this paper for the first time and from there on demand for further description and research on capitalism and democracy in the digital age.

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